4 ms·
So that's at least two linux filesystem creators who have gone off the rails; should we consider it a potential diagnostic symptom?
by pavel_lishin 8mo ago
So that's at least two linux filesystem creators who have gone off the rails; should we consider it a potential diagnostic symptom?
- thomasjudge 8mo agolol I was having the exact same thought
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- QuercusMax 8mo agoYou gotta be a little bit of a megalomaniac to think it's a good idea to write your own filesystem.
- yomismoaqui 8mo ago"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." So the reasonable man uses Ext4 I guess.
- webdevver 8mo agosomething i have always observed, is how considerate Ted Tso's writing always is, but more than that, how consistent this property has been for so many decades. its quite funny to me that ext4 very much mirrors him in that regard. its underpinning damn well everything, but you'd never know about it because it works so well.
- lproven 8mo ago> how considerate Ted Tso's writing always is This is less true when T'so asks questions at conferences, of course. https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/02/rust_for_linux_maintainer_steps_down/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/02/rust_for_linux_mainta... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=1529s
- lproven 8mo ago> So the reasonable man uses Ext4 I guess. And the unreasonable one writes his own Unix clone... and ends up putting several multi-million-dollar companies out of business. I know which I admire more, TBH. But I use ext4, yeah.
- nancyminusone 8mo agoWell, Terry A. Davis made one.
- yomismoaqui 8mo agoThe question is if developing filesystems attracts a certain kind of people or the act of debugging filesystem issues & being flamed on the kernel mailing list makes people that way.
- QuercusMax 8mo agoI figure that folks working on printers have gotta have a much more frustrating experience than FS devs
- yomismoaqui 8mo agoMaybe the folks that try to use printers are more frustrated that the ones that designed their software.
- bob1029 8mo agoMy worst technology experience of all time was maintaining support for a Zebra label printer in VB6. I can assure you that the users of these printers had maybe 1% the cortisol response I did when something went wrong. Designing software for a printer means being a very aggressive user of a printer. There's no way to unit test this stuff. You just have to print the damn thing and then inspect the physical artifact.
- QuercusMax 8mo agoA million years ago I worked on some code which needed to interface with a DICOM radiology printer (the kind that prints on transparency film). Each time I had to test it I felt like I was burning money.
- krupan 8mo agoWorked on printer firmware, can confirm. "If it looks good, it is good." was a mantra
- repstosb 8mo agoDefinitely... http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pdf http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/202/summer.reconstructed.pd...
- throawayonthe 8mo agowho's the other one?
- dmead 8mo agoIdk. I don't think either he nor reiser were ruby devs.
- cperciva 8mo agoI think the important question here is whether Linux filesystems are more or less hazardous than statistical mechanics. (For anyone not familiar with the text, Goodstein's treatment of the subject opens with "Ludwig Boltzman, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.")
- AlexeyBelov 8mo agoHe was (is) also participating here on HN, and it was clear he's not, like, totally OK.